by Mike Hogan
I put the problem aside and went downstairs to visit Mrs Hudson. She was making a most remarkable recovery for a lady of her age.
I was with Mrs Hudson in her room reading her a comic story from Punch, when I heard a four-wheeler cab draw up outside our door. I went out into the hall just as the front door opened and Holmes led a lady by the arm into the house. Young Churchill followed them. I was astonished to see that it was Miss Caspar, dressed in the same blue skirt and white jacket that she wore on her first visit to us, and with the straw hat and mauve band that Major Massingham had described. She looked pale and nervous. I bowed and murmured a greeting, but she was swept past me by Holmes and hurried upstairs.
“Tea, Bessie,” Holmes called over his shoulder.
I caught Churchill by the arm.
“Miss Caspar does not look well,” I said.
“She’s had a shock, Doctor,” Churchill said with an impudent grin. “And another’s coming.”
The doorbell rang again. Billy admitted Inspector Lestrade and Constable Endaby. They looked understandably pleased with themselves. Lestrade had no doubt passed on to Endaby details of the vile Stockton papers. I felt a surge of anger against them, and a counter-surge of pity for the young lady upstairs.
I followed them up the stairs, with Churchill at my heels.
Miss Caspar was not present in the sitting room as Lestrade and Endaby took their places on the sofa. Holmes saw my puzzled look; he nodded his head towards the curtained alcove where Billy had recovered from his faint. No doubt, I thought, poor Miss Caspar was preparing herself there before she met her fate at the hands of her accusers. I was disappointed to note that Churchill could not restrain a wide and unseemly grin from distorting his features. I gave him a stern look of rebuke and reproach that brought him to his senses.
“We have just enough chairs for the expected company,” said Holmes. “Make a fresh pot of tea, Bessie, and bring more cups.”
I could not think why would need them; who else might have an interest in the revelations of Miss Caspar’s guilt? I wished that she had brought support in the shape of the formidable Mrs Barker.
The doorbell rang, and a moment later, to my utter confusion and chagrin, Billy showed in Major Massingham. He spotted me immediately and crossed the room to shake my hand in an unpleasantly intimate manner. I was obliged to introduce him to Holmes and to Inspector Lestrade. Massingham took a seat at the table with Churchill. They began an animated conversation about the boy’s impending attendance at Harrow School. Massingham, it seemed, was an alumnus of that institution. Churchill was much more self-possessed than I should have been in his situation.
The bell rang yet again. This, I thought, was beginning to resemble the last act of a French farce, with all the characters gathered in the drawing room waiting for the various misunderstandings to be unravelled.
The door opened and I was pleased to see that Mrs Barker was at the door. Then I was struck completely out of countenance when I saw that following her was Miss Caspar! I could not for a moment imagine how or why she had been spirited outside and brought back in again. I looked to where Holmes stood at the alcove curtain.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he cried in his most theatrical style. “I present to you -”
He pulled the curtain along its runners to reveal the alcove and the small sofa on which Billy had lain. A lady stood and turned to face the company.
“Miss E Caspar,” said Holmes.
“Twins,” I said as the last of our guests left. I helped myself to a Scotch and soda.
“Not quite,” said Holmes. “Elizabeth, our client, is one year older than her flighty sister Eliza.”
“Eliza was dancing along Regent Street waving her parasol,” I said.
“Yes, she had just received a wire intimating that her protector, the commander in the Royal Navy of whom Lestrade made mention, was returning to Town on leave. She was in the West End buying new gloves and a smart hat for the occasion of their reunion. She has, as you saw, an open, pretty nature, and she had enough experience from her time in Stockton and London to deal with the remarks made to her by male pests as she walked along. She rebuffed their advances, but she enjoyed their attention. I do not find it in my heart to condemn her.”
“So said Pest in the newspaper, Holmes.” I said stiffly. “I can hardly believe it. She must have been thoroughly debauched in Stockton to have behaved in such an untrammelled way in the streets of London.”
“That is what PC Endaby thought; he glossed her excitement at the return of her lover as an advertisement of sexual availability. He arrested her and brought her back to Oxford Circus. There, the crowd jostled them, and he lost her. Eliza skipped across the road and caught a ‘bus home to Covent Garden.”
“And Endaby hurried through the strolling pedestrians along Oxford Street and caught sight of what he thought was his quarry outside the Chrystal Palace Bazaar.”
“Exactly. That was the older sister, Elizabeth, who is perfectly innocent. The Stockton allegations referred to Eliza: Miss E Caspar, junior.”
“Why didn’t Endaby mention that he’d lost hold of the girl?” I asked.
“Professional embarrassment, perhaps. He would not and did not think it had any bearing on the case. You saw his astonishment at the revelation of the two Miss Caspars.”
“I think it vile that Eliza did not come forward to relieve her sister,” said I. “She must have known; it was all over the newspapers.”
“The only periodical that the younger Miss Caspar subscribes to is The Girl’s Own Paper. She was reading an article on pearl buttons when I visited,” said Holmes. “She had no idea of her sister’s plight.”
“Surely Miss Elizabeth Caspar must have realised -”
“Perhaps; we shall never know. She and her sister were estranged. The younger Miss Caspar left her family home last year. Her nautical admirer has set her up in a comfortable position near Covent Garden. The two sisters have not communicated since that time. I gambled a trip to darkest Stockton to see if the mother had received any letters from her errant daughter. After much persuasion, she admitted that she had. A simple matter, then, to set Wiggins and his men to stake out my quarry.”
“The clothes, Holmes. They wore almost identical costumes.”
“Sisters, Watson. And all the clothes were made by Miss Caspar senior. Two of each; it is a common trope.”
“And what of the policemen who saw nothing?”
“Untrained observers. I have written to the Police Commissioners to acquaint them with the inadequacy of their training system for constables, let alone for detectives. They reply that they suffer a twenty-two per cent turnover in police officers yearly and that it is impossible to institute the ten-week course on basic principles of detection that I advocate.”
“Well, Holmes, I saw but evidently I did not observe. When did you first guess - I’m sorry, when did you realise that there were two ladies involved?”
Holmes waved his pipe stem at young Churchill.
“Would you like to answer that, Spencer-Churchill?”
“Me, sir?” said Churchill. “Oh, my suspicions were immediately aroused when we met Miss Caspar and Mrs Barker outside in the street below us. After Major Massingham’s testimony, it was clear that there were two ladies involved.”
I looked across at Holmes. He blinked back at me.
“How so?” I asked.
“PC Endaby insisted that Miss Caspar waved her parasol in a suggestive way. Miss Caspar did not bring a parasol with her when she came here to Baker Street, despite the bright sunshine. She wore a wide-brimmed straw hat. And Major Massingham stated that the lady arrested before him in Oxford Street had no parasol; there had to be two ladies.”
“Exactly,” said Holmes after a long pause.
9. Left for Dead at the Diggings
A Simple Experiment
That evening, Holmes and I had a pleasant dinner at a chophouse in the Strand, during which I brought him up to date on our interview with Mr Taylor and with Mrs Plum.
“You advertised for Taylor in the agony columns, Watson. That was an excellent idea. And it bore fruit.”
“A ploy that you have used on any number of occasions, Holmes.”
He nodded.
“If Taylor killed the Negro boy,” I asked, “why did he do it in Limehouse? Is that where the boy lived? And why did he return to the scene of the crime the following day? Was it Taylor in disguise who took the lodgings under the name of Richard Wilmer? Or is there another Cape Colonial hunting for Bobby and Aaron?”
“The boy is thirteen,” said Holmes. “Taylor took him to America when he was six. Taylor must have been in Southern Africa at the time of the Zulu Wars in ‘79; that is interesting.”
“I do not see a connection, Holmes.”
“Nor do I,” he answered with a smile.
We left the restaurant, and Holmes led me down the nearby steps to the River. “Hire us a steam launch, would you, Watson?”
“Where to?”
“The Grapes, Limehouse.”
I sat with Holmes in the prow of a small steam launch. The engineer kept to a steady pace, manoeuvring smoothly around other traffic and calling out imaginative curses at the fat, sluggish Thames barges bumping along with the tide.
“Why are we returning to the Grapes?”
Holmes smiled again.
“A simple experiment.”
We landed at the steps of the Grapes, climbed past where the body of the young man had been recovered, and stepped again onto the small wooden balcony that jutted over the River.
“We are just on our time,” said Holmes sitting and consulting his pocket watch. A boy pushed open the door to the pub and edged out holding a tray of drinks.
“Ahoy, gents,” he said. “Grog’s up.”
“Wiggins!” I exclaimed.
“Good to see you again, Doctor. Mr Holmes was worried about us out here in the wilds of Limehouse. But he doesn’t know the half of it, does he?”
Wiggins distributed half-pints of ale.
“Now, to business, gentlemen,” said Holmes. “Our quarry is due in two hours, but were I he, I might arrive an hour or so before my time to reconnoitre the ken, don’t you agree? Let us drink up and take our positions.”
“Who are we waiting for?” I asked.
“Well, let us see who turns up,” said Holmes with an annoying grin. “Wiggins, I want to show you something.” They went inside the bar.
Holmes emerged a few minutes later.
“Come, Watson.” He led me through the pub, ignoring Wiggins leaning against the bar, and out the front door. We walked along the busy road for a few yards and turned in to the front yard of Mrs Plum’s empty building, next along the riverfront from the Grapes.
He knocked softly on the door. It opened and we filed inside and up the stairs to the large front room on the floor above. The gas lamps glowed weakly. A half-dozen chairs were grouped around a large table on the terrace outside. Holmes lit a tall oil lamp that illuminated a tray of drinks and glasses.
“Well done, young man,” said Holmes. “Everything is as it should be.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Churchill emerging from the shadows. “I’ll keep watch.”
“Holmes,” I said, taking a seat at the table. “What is going on?”
He passed me a note. “I sent that telegram today from the central post office to Mr Taylor’s suite at the Langham Hotel.”
For information whereabouts Bobby meet 75 Narrow Road, Limehouse, eleven pm. W.
“I don’t understand, Holmes.”
Churchill appeared in the doorway.
“He’s here,” he said.
We followed Churchill into a dark front bedroom, and to a window from which we could see the busy street below us.
“In the opera hat,” said Holmes pointing to a tall, heavyset man who had just alighted from a cab.
“It is Taylor,” I said. “He is looking at the building next door.”
Churchill giggled. “We took off the number plates.”
“Vandals,” I murmured.
“He is lost,” said Holmes. “He does not know this building.”
“He is going to the pub to ask directions,” said Churchill, beaming at Holmes. “Just as Mr Holmes predicted.”
Holmes rubbed his hands together.
“It was an unlikely hypothesis and now it is scotched. He is not the murderer of the young Negro. He does not know this building. It was worth our effort just for that, but I hope that we may be able to glean more information from Mr Taylor before the night is out. Here he comes, with the helpful Master Wiggins showing him the way.”
I heard a loud knock on the front door downstairs.
“It’s open,” Churchill whispered.
The sound of a door opening and slamming shut came from the hall downstairs.
“White?” Taylor shouted in his coarse Colonial accent. “Where the hell are you?”
Holmes met my gaze and put his finger to his lips.
“White? Come out, you cur.”
Doors slammed open and closed on the ground floor. A silence, and then I heard a heavy tread on the stairs.
“White! If you have harmed the boy, I will do for you if I swing for it!”
The door crashed open. Taylor stood in the doorway flushed, sweating and breathing heavily. He wore evening dress and a top hat that scraped the ceiling. His red mutton chop-whiskers were unbrushed, and his clothes were dishevelled. He held his heavy stick in one hand and a large pistol in the other.
“Mr Maxwell P Taylor, I presume,” said Holmes. “I am Sherlock Holmes. It is a fine evening. Let us take a seat on the terrace.”
“A tray of beers from the pub, Wiggins,” said Holmes. “Unless you prefer something stronger, Mr Taylor?”
“Scotch,” he growled.
Holmes waved Wiggins off and led the way out onto the terrace. Wiggins tapped me on the shoulder.
“Dosh, Doctor?”
I handed him a half-sovereign. “I expect change, Wiggins.”
He laughed a most impertinent laugh and thundered downstairs. We sat at the table outside.
“Now, Mr Taylor,” said Holmes. “I must apologise for summoning you here on false pretences, but it was in your interests. The police are investigating the case of the dead Negro man and interviewing all likely foreign persons. They suspect the murderer has a Cape accent. They will get to you eventually, and you will find yourself in an awkward position.”
“I did not kill that man,” said Taylor.
“Doctor Watson was convinced of your innocence. I arranged this little charade to prove it. You had trouble finding the house - we had removed the house numbers - and you decided to ask for directions at the pub. Mr Wiggins, one of our confederates, guided you here.”
Holmes smiled. “You do not know this house.”
“Never been here before in my life,” said Taylor in his thick accent, made thicker, I suspected, by drink. He looked around the terrace. “Never in my life.”
“The young Negro man was murdered on the roof above us, and thrown into the Thames. I think you know, or at least suspect, who did it. And you think that the same person is searching for Bobby and his companion.”
Taylor shook his head and said nothing.
“Spencer-Churchill?”
“The suspect is over six feet,” said Churchill. “He’s in his sixties, swarthy, with a salt-and-pepper moustache and grey hair, balding at the top. He is left-handed, and he favours his right arm. He habitually wears evening dress. He carries a leaded cane and speaks
with a thick Cape Colony accent.”
“My God,” said Taylor softly. “You know everything.”
“His name is White,” said Holmes, “Richard, or more probably Robert White. You and he are, or were, close associates, probably at the Cape in diamond or gold mining. He is Bobby’s natural father.”
The Honour of the Irregulars
“All right, Mr Holmes,” said Taylor after a long pause. “You have most of it. Rob White and me were in the diamond business together in Griqualand on the Transvaal side of the Vaal River at Klipdrift. We went through our little capital in a short while. Coal to heat our sorting basins came from Kimberley at thirteen pounds per ton. It shipped to the diggings at three times that cost. Life was hard, but we struck lucky in our second year. The dig gave up garnets, agates, and diamonds of value, of considerable value.”
Wiggins passed around drinks and we settled ourselves.
“White was married?” asked Holmes.
“He had a woman. She was a Boer lass that he’d picked up in Natal when he lived there in the mid-seventies. Bobby was their son. It was not a marriage; it was a convenience.”
Taylor drained his whisky. Churchill refilled his glass.
“The long and the short of it is that we quarrelled,” said Taylor. “Not over the money, as was the usual way with partnerships, but over the woman. She cleaved to me, sir, more than to her husband. White slit the woman’s throat for infidelity. I found the corpse in their hut at the diggings when I came a-visiting. He laid in wait. We fought, and we cut each other. I had the better of the match and left him bleeding his heart out. Yes, I got the best of it and left him for dead. So I thought.
“I loaded up the wagon, and I contemplated on the boy. He was six, and as cute as a button. He had her character: soft and sweet and loving. I could not let him come home to that blood and death. It was not in me to permit it, Mr Holmes; you understand that. I rode to the kraal of his nanny, a Bantu woman, and picked him up. I discharged her with a payment, and made some excuse about trekking north with Rob: Rob White, the dead man.”
